Hacked Ashley Madison Data Reportedly Leaked Online

Spouses Of The Ashley Madison Leak Are Being Targeted In New Blackmail Attempts

Long Story Short

Despite eight months passing since the extramarital affairs site was hacked, the drama continues. Now the spouses of former and current users are allegedly being targeted in new blackmail attempts.

Long Story

If you ever signed up for Ashley Madison (tagline: "Life's short, have an affair") – even if you never followed through – you've probably had some serious explaining to do over the past eight months. Back in July, hackers breached AshleyMadison.com and stole a tremendous amount of user data. That data was posted online, along with a second dump twice the size of the original later in the week.

The second dump focused on Ashley Madison's internal data (rather than the original, which released member info, email addresses, passwords, bank details, etc), including a massive amount of email from its parent company's CEO Noel Biderman. The new data was accompanied by a statement directed at Biderman that read, "Hey Noel, you can admit it's real now." Yikes.

While the lawsuits began last summer, we can be probably expect a boatload more ASAP. Why? Because now things have got even worse.

Reports claim letters have been sent to the home addresses of some Ashley Madison spouses, demanding that they pay USD $2,500 worth of Bitcoins (the digital currency) or face having their partners' infidelities exposed. To date, such cases have only been recorded in the US.

Bad news cheaters: Your spouse is now way more involved in your affair than you ever imagined possible.

The hookup site, which claims to have just under 40 million users, surprisingly reports that it is growing, despite last year’s high-profile hack.

Some email addresses the hack uncovered were more recognisable than others:

Some initial calculations indicate that as many as 15,000 – yes, 15,000 – email addresses are from a .mil or .gov email address.

Some interesting ones include:

iraq.centcom.mil

nasa.gov

fbi.gov

centcom.mil

nsa.gov

whitehouse.gov

fakeemail.gov

One problem with Ashley Madison's security was that user info was not deleted after they had ended their subscription. So even if you thought you'd been scrubbed, your name and email address might still have appeared in the leak.

I interviewed AshleyMadison's founding CTO about the claimed leak of its data. He says no indications it's real http://t.co/q8rOyxwB7u